In recent years, reading parties, or moments of collective reading, have been growing in popularity, particularly in big cities. The principle is simple: bring people together in a café, a bookshop, a bar, a library, a garden, or a cultural or heritage venue, to read, each with their own book, but… together! No imposed discussion, no particular activity: you come to share a moment of reading, in a collective and silent presence.
The idea does seem a little strange, though… What could be more solitary and ubiquitous than reading? To read, it seems we need nobody, nor any particular or exceptional circumstances. What other activity can be carried so easily everywhere, at any time, from the metro to the sofa, from the beach to the café terrace? So what is this sudden need to create a kind of summons to read, and a collective one at that?
Reading parties in fact answer several aspirations of our time: rediscovering the taste for reading, at a time when many of our fellow citizens observe that it is “harder and harder to read”, but also slowing down the race, escaping digital demands, and enjoying the pleasure of being together without any obligation to talk or to entertain one another. In a world where digital technologies promise to meet all our needs, including leisure and relationships, reading parties seem to offer us a way of gently getting used again to the pleasure of reading and the pleasure of collective life.
An old practice, a new enthusiasm
Collective reading is not a recent invention. Literary salons, reading circles and libraries have long provided spaces of sociability around books. While reading has always been able to be an intimate activity, it is just as suited to building community.
Contemporary reading parties belong to this history, while giving it a new form. They are not necessarily about discussing a book, sharing impressions or taking part in a debate. Everyone brings their own book, settles in and reads at their own pace. The group does not need to share the same text to share an experience.
The need to disconnect… and to connect
The rise of reading parties can be linked to a form of digital saturation. Incessant notifications, messages, work demands, scrolling through content: our screens capture a large share of our attention and can make it harder to be available to ourselves and to others.
Reading offers another sense of time. It requires sitting down, sustaining attention, following a narrative thread or a line of thought. In a world marked by fragmented attention, it is an experience of continuity and immersion.
But what makes reading parties original is that they combine this disconnection with a collective presence. Here, the group, even if made up of strangers, even if silent, can play a supporting role in reclaiming time for oneself. Everyone remains immersed in their own inner world and/or in that of the work they are reading, while feeling the presence of others. A kind of bond that rests neither on conversation nor on social performance. Simply a coexistence of individual activities that produces a sense of belonging.
The paradox of a disconnection organised through the networks
Reading parties do, however, raise a particularly interesting contradiction. To disconnect from screens, we often have to go through them. For the events are of course announced and shared… on social media! Participants discover the venues, sign up online, follow the organisers’ accounts and sometimes share their experience through photographs or videos. Social media thus become the intermediaries of an activity that is precisely trying to break free of them.
But using a social network to find a reading evening obviously does not serve the same function as remaining captive to a stream of content for hours on end. The challenge therefore lies in the possibility of regaining control of our attention and our time. Putting the screen back in its place as a tool (in this case an information tool), and rediscovering spaces of availability that we should never have lost.
M.-N. C.
